


Darken

by Anonymous



Series: Eyesore [4]
Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Eye Trauma, Gen, Kidnapping, Torture, torture of child characters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-02
Updated: 2019-12-02
Packaged: 2021-02-26 07:08:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,205
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21639352
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: Sasuke has known darkness in this place where they've been imprisoned, but not like this. Never like this.
Relationships: Haruno Sakura & Uchiha Sasuke
Series: Eyesore [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1559842
Kudos: 24
Collections: Anonymous





	Darken

**Author's Note:**

> PLEASE HEED THE WARNINGS. see end note for more explicit warning about the torture.

There’s a distinct crash, and Sakura looks up from the corner of the cell that she’s huddled in, the corner that she has called home for the past year. At least, she thinks it’s been a year. Time passes in strange ways in here, in this underground fortress that she has been forced to take up residence in. Sometimes she blinks and two days have passed, other times, the wait in between meals feels like a lifetime.

She looks up, and it’s one of her captors, the big one with the nasty scar bisecting his face, holding Sasuke by the scruff of his neck. He’s – he’s making noises, but it’s muffled, and she belatedly notices the gag that has been stuffed into his mouth, the bandage that has been tied around his eyes, the white of the cotton stained with blood.

“Sasuke-kun!” she yelps before she can stop herself, and earns herself a kick to the side for her troubles. Bracing her back against the wall, she waits for scarred shinobi-san to leave, and keeps her mouth pressed closed. He dumps Sasuke unceremoniously on the ground, and he immediately begins crawling toward her, reaching toward her as he struggles to make sounds around his gag.

“Make sure he shuts up,” scarred shinobi-san says, nodding toward Sasuke. She nods, and can feel how wide her eyes are.

The second that their cell door is locked again, she’s scrambling toward Sasuke, desperately reaching forward to yank the gag out of his mouth. His cheeks are damp with sweat and blood-stained tears, and he smells of day-old puke and piss. It’s putrid and horrifying, but she holds him close as he whimpers and asks, “Sakura-chan?”

“It’s me,” she says. “It’s me, it’s me. What did they do, what did they do to you?”

He doesn’t seem to hear her, his hands reaching out blindly to feel for her face. “I can’t see, it hurts,” he says, his voice a whisper but edging on hysterical toward the end of his sentence. “I can’t see, I can’t see!”

“Yes, they’ve –” she starts, trying to remember anything Tsunade-sama had taught her about ocular jutsu before they had been stolen away.

“It hurts! I can’t see!” he continues, the rate of his breathing increasing and his hands grasping at Sakura’s shoulders. “Sakura-chan, why can’t I see?”

“They’ve put a blindfold over your eyes, Sasuke, hold still so I can take it off,” she says, hands shaking as she reaches for it. She can’t explain the sinking feeling in her chest that the blindfold has nothing to do with his lack of sight. Still, she smears a thumb over the blood on his cheeks, and tenderly lifts the cloth off of his face, looking away and squeezing her eyes tight as she does. She doesn’t want to look, but she forces herself to.

“What?” he asks when she doesn’t say anything. She can’t bring herself to tell him that where his eyes once were, empty sockets sit now, the job shoddily done, his eyes torn out and his face left bloody and useless. “Sakura-chan, I still can’t see!”

“That’s…”

“What?” he asks again, hands going up to grasp at his face, and he screams when he feels nothing where his eyes should be.

“Shh!” she scolds, smacking her hand over Sasuke’s mouth. Close to him, in the dim light, she can see tears pooling in his empty eye sockets, and she distantly thinks about how they had not torn out the lacrimal gland in the haste to get the sharingan, and then scolds herself for thinking about medical knowledge at a time like this. “Shh,” she says again, softer. “Scarred shinobi-san will come back if you scream.”

“Okay,” is what he tries to say, but Sakura hears it as a hitching breath. “Why did they take my eyes, Sakura-chan? W–why?”

“Shh, Sasuke,” she says, pulling him into her arms, because this is what he had done for her when she was the one undergoing the torture. First, they had hurt her over and over to find out what Tsunade-sama had taught her. It didn’t matter to them that she was only a genin, that she hadn’t learned any special jutsus yet. They just kept hurting and hurting her, and every day, Sasuke would hold her until they managed to fall asleep.

Then, they had figured out that Sasuke was an Uchiha, and they had both been doomed. She had been used as a tool to awaken his sharingan and every day she could only be thankful that they hadn’t just killed her so that they could crawl into each other’s arms every night. She hated to think of him stuck here alone.

He whimpers again, and Sakura thinks she hears him asking for his mother, and then for Itachi, and her heart breaks. He sounds like he did at the academy, young, and not the 11 year old chuunin that he was.

“Shhh, we should try to sleep,” she says, running her hands through his hair in a semblance of comfort. It’s what her mother used to do for her when she was running a fever. She wondered where her mother was now, wondered if she was angry that no one was coming for them. Sakura shakes her head, trying to get the thought out of her head. If she dwelled on things like that for too long, this place became more unbearable than it already was.

“I can’t shut my eyes,” he mumbles. “I can’t shut my eyes, I can’t shut my eyes!” His voice sounds hysterical despite its whisper-tone, he has remembered scarred shinobi-san’s threat.

“Sasuke,” she says, brushing her fingers over his eyelids and sweeping them over his bloody sockets. “Would you like me to put the blindfold back on?”

“Not that,” he says, “no, not that, please, not that.”

“No,” she agrees right away, nodding before she remembers he can’t see, he can’t  _ see, _ it hurts in her stomach and she doesn’t understand, but she thinks she might puke. But she has to stay strong for her teammate, for her fellow shinobi. “No, I’ll – it’s part of my shirt, okay?” She rips off the bottom of her already tattered shirt, and ties it gently around his eyes.

“Okay,” he murmurs, clutching at her shirt as she settles them down onto the worn patch of dirt that they have made into their bed. “Okay, okay.”

He tucks his head into the joint of her shoulder and jaw, and his hair, damp and sticky, feels uncomfortable on her neck, but she lets him be. He’s still shaking, she can feel, and she hates the shinobi who have put them here, hates the world for fighting this war, hates her village for deeming them unworthy of rescue. She has seen their jounin fight, she has watched their Hokage train, she  _ knows _ that someone could rescue them. But here they lay, her unable to sleep for fear of the replayed torture that flashed through her dreamscape every night, her teammate without  _ eyes, _ the one connection he had left to his clan.

“Sasuke,” she whispers, directly in his ear and quiet as she can. “I am going to get us out of here.”

**Author's Note:**

> CW: sasuke and sakura are kidnapped by enemy forces, sasuke is experimented upon, sasuke's eyes are removed by their captors 
> 
> \--
> 
> thank you for joining us on this fucked up journey! i wonder what else will befall our young protagonists? :)


End file.
